


hell in a bucket

by SafelyCapricious



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Isolation, Rock Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 07:27:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5366462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The room is empty when she finally manages to claw her way out of the rock. She feels like she’s been fighting for years and she barely has the strength to switch the lock on the containment box before she goes under.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hell in a bucket

**Author's Note:**

> BIOSPECIALIST: "LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT..."
> 
> ASKED BY DARKANGELCRYO.
> 
> Previously posted on Tumblr.
> 
> Cannon divergent from the end of Season 2. (I.E. Jemma gets sucked into rock.)

The room is empty when she finally manages to claw her way out of the rock. She feels like she’s been fighting for years and she barely has the strength to switch the lock on the containment box before she goes under.

When she wakes up every inch of her hurts and there’s a group of people in tactical gear aiming weapons at her. It takes her several tries before she can say anything, her mouth drier than a desert, and even then all she can manage is, “Fitz?”

Some of the men – maybe not men, the tactical gear they’re wearing covers their faces and except for height there’s nothing distinguishing about any of them – exchange a glance and then one’s talking into his ear.

She tries to follow what they’re saying – she should be able to easily, she knows all of the communications codes, it’s one of the few sections of her field test she passed with flying colors – but half of them don’t mean anything and she wonders, suddenly terrified, if she’s wrong and they’re not SHIELD but something else.

She wants to ask but she seems to have used up all of her ability to talk asking after Fitz. She doesn’t have long to regret it before a group of seven in biohazard suits show up and approach her slowly.

She thinks she should fight – Skye would fight, May would disable them all in a blink – but she can barely lift her head and so she stays limp when they pick her up. Her muscles scream in protest and she’s not surprised when she blacks out again.

She wakes up in a cell that reminds her of the Cage on the Bus, but the dimensions are wrong. There is an eagle on the wall, though it’s different. Less angular, more curves but – but it’s an eagle and that brings her some comfort.

What happens next is the most painful experience of her life.

For an interrogation it’s actually fairly gentle – they start with giving her water and food and asking her simple questions.

The painful part is that they don’t believe her. Which would be more reasonable if she wasn’t telling the truth.

It takes her an embarrassingly long time to figure it out – nearly three hours before she’s put the pieces together and finally asks, shakily, what year it is.

She becomes a bit unreasonable for a time – and then the physical interrogation happens.

Her answers never change. She’s telling the truth.

On the fourth day, no one comes for her. Her food still gets delivered – by what she imagines would happen if a Roomba and a mannequin had a baby – but she sees no one.

She manages to talk the machine (it’s a robot, she knows it’s a robot but just thinking the word makes her think of Fitz and when she thinks of any of them she ends up in a puddle of tears on the floor) into bringing her paper and pens.

Her requests for reading material are ignored.

Periodically someone will come to collect the work she’s done. Some of it they ignore – she’s not sure if that’s because it’s already been done or if it’s because it’s beyond them still. Once a scientist tries to talk to her, but only manages five minutes of a conversation before a specialist forcibly removes him.

She wonders if they’re actually the enemy. They are SHIELD – she’s seen enough not to doubt that, but a hundred and fifty years later she wonders if SHIELD still stands for what it once did. She could be helping them do horrible things.

There start to be requests on the top sheet of paper the machine brings to her, projects they cannot work through that seem ridiculously easy to her. She doesn’t do them sometimes, just to see what they’ll do.

Nothing happens, nothing changes. She still gets her paper and ink and no company.

If their plan is to bore her enough that she’ll answer, it works. She doesn’t care if they’re the enemy – everyone she loves is dead and what does it matter anyways?

Time passes.

Even her projects cannot keep her entertained.

It takes her nine tries to manage to make a knife out of paper – Ward had made it look so easy.

It hurts – sharp and clear and she doesn’t think about what May would say.

She does it properly, aims for the veins and cuts deep.

She bleeds profusely and passes out from blood loss.

She wakes up and her arms are healed – there’s no sign that anyone has come in, everything is covered in blood and there’s no dressing on her arms, but they’re without even a faint scar.

She starts not to care about the passage of time.

Weeks or maybe months pass. The few people who come to visit her start to get more and more frantic – to demand answers to problems. One of them threatens to hurt her if she doesn’t answer and she laughs until he leaves, and then she cries.

Then the machine stops coming.

She wonders if this will actually hurt her – if she can die of starvation where nothing else worked or if she’ll just become a husk of a person but keep breathing. Her small bathroom still has water, so it’s not bad.

Only a few days have passed – the hunger pains hurt but she’s had worse – when someone finally comes down.

They’re in full tactical gear and a facemask, although it’s different from what she’d seen before. She wonders, only a touch hysterically, if years have passed again and she missed it somehow. She also wonders if she’ll do what they want for food.

She’s not sure. It might be interesting to see what happens to her without it.

She only vaguely notices how still the man on the other side of her cell has gotten as soon as he’d stepped in, her mind moving at a mile a minute as she considers her options.

And then he’s ripping off his mask and it’s her turn to freeze.

“Simmons?” he asks and she crosses the distance until she’s almost pressed against the invisible barrier.

It takes her three tries to find her voice, and when she does it’s thick with tears. “Ward?” She wants to touch him to know that he’s real – she thinks if she was hallucinating she’d imagine someone who doesn’t want to kill her, but maybe that’s what she really wants? She’s not sure which thought is worse and she pushes her hands against the translucent barrier like she could possibly reach through it and touch him. “Are you real?”

He swears in a language she doesn’t recognize and she’s not sure if that makes it more likely or less likely he’s real.

She’s afraid to blink – afraid he’ll disappear – but her eyes are swiftly drying out and it hurts. So she closes them – and keeps them closed because if he’s not real than she wants to keep pretending he is for a moment and – the barrier she’s leaning most of her weight against vanishes and her eyes fly open as she falls forward into his chest.

He might try to kill her – she’s not sure if that’s a bad thing or not – but he’s real and he’s warm and he’s the first person she’s touched without a biohazard suit in over a century and she can’t help but cling.

Cling and sob.

She’s not sure if she’s lost time or if she’d just distracted, but when her tears quiet she can hear Ward’s voice rumbling against her ear – but when she looks up he’s not talking to her. “So, let me get this straight. You somehow managed to recover Jemma Simmons and you kept her locked up?”

There’s a gurgle in response, and when she turns her head a bit she can see that there’s a large dark skinned man holding her interrogator by his throat. She blinks, slowly, and the dark skinned man grins at her.

She smiles back.

Ward makes a disapproving noise in his throat. “I guess this at least explains why your weapons have gotten so much better recently – it’s a pity it won’t last.”

Her interrogator gets thrown in her cell – dried blood still covering the floor, sink dripping it’s soothing drip drip drop – and Ward starts to lead her out.

“My notes?” she asks, softly, and the other man grabs them before following Ward.

She’s suddenly aware of how cold she’d been and for how long as she slowly warms up against Ward’s skin.

She’s hungry, too.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find my writing tumblr [here](http://capriciouswrites.tumblr.com/). <3 Prompts are always welcome! Come say hi!


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